I sure hope repairability and being able to upgrade your devices by yourself will make a return. Throw in extending the "planned obsolescence" by a few years and I'm back in.

But I doubt it will happen.

(Left Apple about five years ago when they decided to drop support for my still well-spec'd MBP.)

It's easier to find a scapegoat (the senior engineer to sign off) than to question the "productivity gains" that brought us these outages in the first place. But where will they find people willing to risk their career in the future?

I'm not overly confident that AI will be ready for unsupervised production use in the forseeable future.

...for certain values of "always".

I guess the customers will only learn _not_ to buy the latest, shiniest and most expensive devices from premium brands if they're arbitrarily killed off a while later.

Why not simply settle for noname Ali*xpress stuff instead? Same functionality, same lifespan, less emotional attachment.

Map updates.

...the next subprime mortgage crisis on the horizon.

"...the more affordable iPhone 16e proving especially popular among consumers who favor smaller devices."

Yeah, I've recently bought a refurbed iPhone SE 3 after holding out for two years for a 1:1 replacement. That's a lost sale for Apple.

I'm still not interested in huge, tablet-sized smartphones, but it seems the market has spoken.

I just logged in (after years) to give my +1 to your post. That particular line rubbed me the wrong way too.

Heck, I'd love to buy one of these to store Chia seeds :-)

Now imagine smartphone manufacturers using that coating for the backside of their phones... Instant profit!

Ahhh, I get it. Another 4% launch. :-/

Wouldn't that spoil the moon? Why is the first instinct of Mankind to just litter everything they can reach :->

Ahhh, Doom. Back in university my roommate and I played it a lot. After a while, we swapped the sounds for samples taken from random comics. To this day I still remember the yodelling doors and yawning (= dying) imps...

You can still ask their support to switch you back to the free plan. The process was remarkably painless, given Google's usual track record.

That's what I tried too. First with my current bank advisor, then with my former. Both said they couldn't do anything, except for me "opening further services and getting a discount". Yeah... No.